gowth to clatter,
And rowp lyk revin and ruke.
The Devill sa devit was with thair yell
That in the depest pot of Hell
He smorit thame with smoke."

Similar allusions will be found in the writings of Montgomerie; but such
caricatures of Gaelic and the bagpipes afford but a slender basis for a
theory of racial antagonism.

After the Union of the Crowns, the Lowlands of Scotland came to be more
and more closely bound to England, while the Highlands remained
unaffected by these changes. The Scottish nobility began to find its
true place at the English Court; the Scottish adventurer was
irresistibly drawn to London; the Scottish Presbyterian found the
English Puritan his brother in the Lord; and the Scottish Episcopalian
joined forces with the English Cavalier. The history of the seventeenth
century prepared the way for the acceptance of the Celtic theory in the
beginning of the eighteenth, and when philologists asserted that the
Scottish Highlanders were a different race from the Scottish Lowlanders,
the suggestion was eagerly adopted. The views of the philologists were
confirmed by the experiences of the 'Forty-five, and they received a
literary form in the _Lady of the Lake_ and in _Waverley_. In the
nineteenth century the theory received further development owing to the
fact that it was generally in line with the arguments of the defenders
of the Edwardian policy in Scotland; and it cannot be denied that it
holds the field to-day, in spite of Mr. Robertson's attack on it in
Appendix R of his _Scotland under her Early Kings_.

The writer of the present volume ventures to hope that he has, at all
events, done something to make out a case for re-consideration of the
subject. The political facts on which rests the argument just stated
will be found in the text, and an Appendix contains the more important
references to the Highlanders in mediaeval Scottish literature, and
offers a brief account of the feudalization of Scotland. Our argument
amounts only to a modification, and not to a complete reversal of the
current theory. No historical problems are more difficult than those
which refer to racial distribution, and it is impossible to speak
dogmatically on such a subject. That the English blood of the Lothians,
and the English exiles after the Norman Conquest, did modify the race
over whom Malcolm Canmore ruled, we do not seek to deny. But that it was
a modification and not a displacement, a victory of ci